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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26787154">I listen to the roar of the sea and it speaks to me like a mother's voice</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake'>Blake</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works &amp; Related Fandoms, The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Cultural Differences, F/F, Flirting, Friends to Lovers, Grief Bonding, Grief/Mourning, Hair Braiding, Massage, Mommy Issues, Road Trips, Wine, everybody lives (except Kili)/nobody dies (except Kili)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 05:55:12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,264</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26787154</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>She has no words, in any case, to describe what Dís is to her. The mother of a boy she could have married. The mother she could have had. The only woman she knows who has lost her mate to death. The only person who knows what her heart looks like. The soul she feels drawn to, instead of the sea.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Dís/Tauriel</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>21</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>I listen to the roar of the sea and it speaks to me like a mother's voice</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>By the time Tauriel comes to the Blue Mountains, Dís has already heard the news. Of course she has. Tauriel stands at her doorway with tears in her eyes, the weight of an etched stone stretching the bones of her palm as she clenches her fist around her own foolishness.</p>
<p>Dís’s dark eyes are dry and matte as spent wood burnt and blackened by fire. She has shed her tears already.</p>
<p>Tauriel grinds her teeth to stop the tears from falling, though they have become the strange, new companion of her travels, and her cheeks are jealous for their comforting touch. She does not understand why crying comforts her grief even as it indulges, but neither does she understand how she came to fall in love with a dwarf over the course of several days. There are many secrets of her heart she was never taught to explore.</p>
<p>Without a word, Dís looks on, showing no sign of recognition or curiosity on her broad, delicate features. Her silence is intimidating, as is the stern indifference of her gaze. Tauriel decides she should leave as soon as possible. She does not know why she came here, except for that it had somehow seemed like the path of least resistance, despite the weeks of lonely journeying and crossing mountains in winter. She had come here, to the mother of the one she loved, to the mother of the one she had failed to protect, as easily as a water droplet making its way back to the sea.</p>
<p>She is surprised by her own gasp of pain as she extends her hand and opens it. Surely it’s the ignoble, barely-conscious pain of a mollusk being cracked open for its precious pearl.</p>
<p>Dís’s eyes do not grow wet with tears. In fact, they hardly look at the runestone, apparently too busy scrutinizing Tauriel’s face. It feels awful, the opposite of every atonement Tauriel craved, for it feels like this exchange is for <em>her </em>sake, for <em>her </em>grief. </p>
<p>“He would have kept his promise to you,” she says with shuddering breath, “had I not failed to protect him.”</p>
<p>A hand closes around hers, two palms pressed together around blood-warmed stone. Her vision is too blurry to read Dís’s face.</p>
<p>“I have no doubt he would have kept his promise to you, too.” The dwarf’s voice is husky with something richer than tears.</p>
<p>Tauriel does not wonder at how Dís could have learned of her son’s promises to a disgraced elf, nor whether Dís would have approved or disapproved of such promises being kept. She is too busy collapsing to her knees and sobbing, for in all these weeks of mourning the loss of Kili’s light from the world, she has not once allowed herself to mourn the imagined fantasy of a life built of might-haves and promises that she would never be able to live.</p>
<p>~~~</p>
<p>Dís makes strong, spicy tea. Tauriel sweetens it with lemon.</p>
<p>She has never been a guest of dwarves before. After the battle, she had stayed at the Lonely Mountain only long enough to offer her services as a healer, long enough to hear of the recovery of every dwarf she knew <em>except </em>the one she most cared about. She had not sought out Kili’s brother, nor his uncle. She felt she could not face them. His mother, however, she <em>had </em>to face.</p>
<p>“I had already feared and faced his death twice over before the battle,” Tauriel says, stirring her tea. She has been in Dís’s house for two days. Only now has she grown so used to swallowing bitterness that it has ceased to weigh down her tongue. “I think I had started to believe he was immortal.” Then, abruptly realizing that it sounds as though she slackened her efforts to protect him, she chokes down a sob. The worst thought in her arsenal is that she could have saved him, and failed through negligence, which is a greater fault than weakness. “But I tried, oh, up until the last, I—”</p>
<p>Dís cuts her off, commanding in equal parts through her humorless countenance and her paradoxically heart-warming beauty. “It is easy to underestimate my son’s recklessness.” Her eyes dart to an empty chair. Her fingers stroke the black length of her beard. “Not many are brave enough to declare their love to an elf.”</p>
<p>There is something soft about the insult, like the soft tumble of her beard across her ample chest, despite the coarse, black lines it is comprised of. It seems like something she would say if Kili were here with them, a mother’s teasing.</p>
<p>Tauriel looks at the empty chair.</p>
<p>~~~</p>
<p>Dís has a bad shoulder from spending hours every day at the forges. Tauriel offers to help mend it, though she does not understand the injury. Dwarves are sturdy folk. Even their royal line must be strong enough to sustain a reasonable amount of time working metal.</p>
<p>But no matter how mysterious the ailment, Tauriel must help in any way she can invent.</p>
<p>She lays her hand upon Dís’s shoulder blade, feeling the heat of thick, inflamed muscle bleeding through layers of embroidered silks and fine furs. “Let me help,” she asks, not for the first time, even as she feels Dís flinch and walk away.</p>
<p>She tries again after riding out into the hills and collecting all the herbs that cool the blood and ease the tight grip anguished muscle takes of its supporting bone.</p>
<p>Dís removes her clothes layer by layer, careful and slow. It strikes Tauriel that this dance is the most beautiful sight she has seen in recent memory: so natural, yet meticulous; so guardedly stubborn for something so baring. When the last layer peels across her shoulder to expose a small triangle of her skin, Tauriel notices that she is paler here than her tawny face, though darker still than her son. Moles skitter across the exposed surface, rendering Tauriel strangely breathless at the thought of how little she ever actually saw or knew of Kili.</p>
<p>She gathers some salve and touches it to the taut surface of Dís’s hard, muscular back. The inflammation burns, but it is not just physical pain that flows up through Tauriel’s wrists and up to her empathetic heart; it is the knowledge, palpable and real beneath her fingers, that Dís has been working tirelessly, forging the same battle-axe over and over again, melting and hammering out her grief until it is perfect—which it never is.</p>
<p>Too stricken to know whether to acknowledge what she knows through Dís’s unwitting vulnerability, or to let the secret pass by unspoken, Tauriel chews on her lips, rubbing across the length of the rigid line of aggravated tendon.</p>
<p>When Dís turns her head to the side, the jagged angles of her profile seem soft in their surety, and her voice is even softer. “They say elvish medicine can heal any ailment.”</p>
<p>The smile-easy crease at the corner of her eye is a kindness, and an acknowledgement of vulnerabilities that cannot be spoken. For they both know all too well that what they say of elvish medicine is not true.</p>
<p>~~~</p>
<p>Dís starts spending less time at the forges, but she still smells of smoke, spice, sweat, and amber.</p>
<p>Tauriel spends every minute possible with her. She has no more idea of why she does this than she does of why she came here in the first place; it is all the same vague, wordless closure sought out by a water drop driving toward the sea.</p>
<p>She accepts her fate every time Dís tells her she’s too busy for guests, or says that she would like to get some sleep, or doesn’t answer the door at all. When the room Tauriel has taken at a nearby inn (despite the many mistrustful stares directed at her ears) grows tiresome, the hills entertain her: so far west, dewy with marine fog, green with foreign grasses whose blades she has never before strained between her fingers.</p>
<p>Tauriel has told Dís the story five times over, but she tells it again, whenever it is requested. Perhaps it is too short a story. A romance of a few days. A rise to believing the world can and must change to accommodate so huge a feeling. A fall to seeing that so huge a feeling might be remembered by only one person.</p>
<p>Or perhaps by two people, if Dís hears the story enough times to memorize it.</p>
<p>“He was so insistent on speaking with me, I thought, at first, that it must be part of some ploy to escape from his confinement.”</p>
<p>Tauriel laughs weakly, and then stops when she realizes she can recall how she felt when looking into Kili’s eyes shining up at her through the bars of his prison, but she cannot recall an actual picture of what his eyes looked like.</p>
<p>Dís’s laugh fills in the silence of her own. When she laughs, it sounds like she’s humming a sad song. “He was not clever enough for such a plan,” she says affectionately.</p>
<p>Tauriel continues to feel surprised and relieved every time Dís makes it clear that she does not blame her for any part in Kili’s fate. She has never known this kind of forgiveness. In the past, she has had her faults either scrutinized and reprimanded or ignored and deemed unworthy of interest. She has never had her faults woven into a story, just one thread among many, subject to the same tugging and fraying.</p>
<p>In the forefront of her mind, she wonders if mothers simply see the world differently. In her most secret heart, she wonders if the peace of this forgiveness is what it would feel like to have a mother.</p>
<p>“Why do you keep me here?” she asks abruptly, compulsively testing the boundaries of forgiveness.  “Why have you not sent me away?”</p>
<p>Dís tilts her chin and her eyes flicker all across Tauriel’s face, searching for something. Her brows are dark, and the padded shadows of her cheekbones are hard to look away from. Tauriel feels herself flush, a gentle reminder that she is alive.</p>
<p>Whatever it is that Dís sees and thinks, she shortens her answer to this: “Because my brother would be furious to know I’m playing hostess to an elf, let alone this particular one.” She had been resting two fingers against her temple, as though propping her head up, but here she moves two fingers to gesture at Tauriel.</p>
<p>Something about being pointed at, looked at, singled out strikes the air from her lungs. She lets the smile on her lips take over her face. “I daresay you’re as petty as any elf,” she accuses sweetly, still enjoying the novelty of speaking ill of her own kind.</p>
<p>Dís hums skeptically and gathers her hair to drape it over one shoulder, dark and heavy with texture and oils. The weight of it leaves indentations on the simple silk shirt covering the solid swell of her breast, and Tauriel imagines what it would it be like to pillow her face there, tears against silk.</p>
<p>~~~</p>
<p>Tauriel chooses not to think of the inevitable day that Dís will leave with her people to return to their hard-won Lonely Mountain. She does not know what she will do, out here in the West, half a world away from the only forest she ever called home, without even the vaguest purpose. Perhaps she will fall into the sea.</p>
<p>“I would not be so proud as to turn down the protection of a skilled warrior, elf or no,” Dís says one day in the middle of a walk, after Tauriel has just pulled back a branch that was in the princess’s way.</p>
<p>Tauriel squints, sensing more meaning than is on the surface. “That is wise,” she says, smiling at the thought of protecting royalty by holding back overzealous ash trees.</p>
<p>Dís glances at her as she passes, then hangs her head and continues to walk. “I do not wish to make the journey with my people.”</p>
<p>In shock, Tauriel lets the branch go. It whips several leaves as it bounces back into place, but none of the leaves is shaken free, for Spring has the earth tight-fisted and greedy for life and green. “You do not?” Tauriel asks. Her hair bounces across her back as she runs to catch up and she thinks, not for the first time, of styling it in a new fashion, with tighter braids to keep its weight more manageable.</p>
<p>“No.” Dís’s broad arm gestures aimlessly toward the east. “I would not be good company. They deserve to be joyful and excited for their return. They need not be burdened with mourning.”</p>
<p>Something green-wick in Tauriel’s center thrums with understanding. She understands how Dís feels. Perhaps better than anybody, she understands how Dís feels. The irreverence of imagining such a claim—when she is not a dwarf and Dís is so very much one—renders her silent with shame at her own feelings. She walks just behind Dís on the narrow woodland path, looking down at the leafy shadows dancing across the top of her head.</p>
<p>“I will make the journey alone, but I would have you join me, if you will.”</p>
<p>Tauriel walks straight into another branch in surprise. She has to stop to untangle her hair from several twigs that are holding onto it like sunlight. Dís turns to watch her. Her eyes are dark where they watch Tauriel’s shaking, struggling fingers. Her cheeks hollow above the graceful line of her bearded jaw.</p>
<p>“I would love to,” Tauriel says lightly, while she is still preoccupied enough to say <em>anything </em>lightly. If her hands were idle, she is sure she would burst into tears of gratitude and professions of devotions she cannot name. “If I ever get free of this tangle.”</p>
<p>Dís returns her smile. Both of their exhales come out sounding like laughter. “Clumsy.” Dís comes closer, wide, bony hands extended. Tauriel exhales-or-laughs again as Dís’s fingers sink into her hair, helping to pull it apart. She cannot remember a single instance of being called clumsy before. “Can’t imagine what Kili saw in you.”</p>
<p>Tauriel closes her eyes, heavy with comfort at the thought of traveling for weeks with the only person who can share this particular flavor of bittersweet humor, who can press on the same bruises and know exactly how much pressure would be too much.</p>
<p>That night, by the fireside, Tauriel lets Dís braid her hair in dwarvish fashion, the better to stay out of her way on their journey. The better to expose a strip of skin at the top of her neck for a soft, motherly kiss that sends shivers of cold-warmth down the length of Tauriel’s spine. </p>
<p>~~~</p>
<p>With so much between them that does not need to be said, Tauriel and Dís share more and more, uninterrupted by the moments of awkwardness that plague them when other dwarves are in their presence. They share stories of all the people they both know, free from the pitying looks of those who would not believe they were ready to laugh about Dís’s lost son or Tauriel’s lost home. They share knowledge of crafts: Dís explaining the process of jewel cutting without narrowing her eyes to assess if Tauriel can be trusted with her trade secrets; Tauriel teaching her how to guess the age of a poplar tree without worrying that Dís is only pretending to be interested out of courtesy.</p>
<p>Most importantly, they share tears. Dís cries on Tauriel’s bosom, and Tauriel holds her close, knowing better than she has known most things on this earth that there is no need to reassure, no need to ask what’s wrong. There is no need for words. That is one of the most precious and proudest truths of Tauriel’s existence.</p>
<p>She has no words, in any case, to describe what Dís is to her. The mother of a boy she could have married. The mother she could have had. The only woman she knows who has lost her mate to death. The only person who knows what her heart looks like. The soul she feels drawn to, instead of the sea.</p>
<p>On the day before their scheduled departure, Tauriel notices a sharp, newly crafted battle-axe resting on the wall beside Dís’s packs. It is speckled with cut jewels, like the moles on her shoulder. Tauriel could cry, but she smiles instead. Dís has chosen a finishing point for her unfinishable project.</p>
<p>~~~</p>
<p>The journey to the Shire is only a few days long, so they make their pace very leisurely. Tauriel would prefer to skip that chapter altogether, and Dís, it would seem, is not as eager to visit and yell at her brother as she professes to be.</p>
<p>“He is a coward,” Dís grumbles, straightening her pony’s mane as they ride.</p>
<p>Tauriel looks out ahead at the rolling green hills of the country where the heir to the throne of Erebor had decided to spend the remainder of his years. It sparkles under the sunlight like an emerald. “I think it takes courage to recognize one’s limitations and forge a new path accordingly.”</p>
<p>Dís is silent for so long that Tauriel turns to see if something is wrong, only to find Dís looking straight at her. “Perhaps, if one’s limitations are the inability to stand by while harm is done to others,” she says wryly.</p>
<p>Tauriel flushes under the sun and turns back to the sight between her horse’s ears, surprised to be caught in a sympathy she was not aware of herself, and flattered that Dís could find the circumstances of her banishment so noble. “Love makes our choices clearer, sometimes,” she says humbly.</p>
<p>“Sometimes,” Dís agrees.</p>
<p>~~~</p>
<p>They camp one last night on the outskirts of what looks like endless farmland. Tauriel bathes in a stream while Dís starts a fire and some food. The water feels on the brink of warming, just moments of sunlight away from being brought to full life. The energy of that warmth-about-to-be shimmers along Tauriel’s skin, vibrating and cleansing. She lingers. She submerges in the buoyant embrace and surfaces only when she needs air, or when she sees Dís standing at the edge of the stream.</p>
<p>“If there was one thing my husband could not stand, it was cold water.” Dís smiles and kneels, splashing two handfuls of water across her face and rubbing her broad fingers across every surface. The water clings delicately to her beard, eyelashes, and the tip of her nose. She is beautiful. She is wise, funny, and beautiful.</p>
<p>Tauriel stands up tall with crossed arms. She thumbs across her biceps, remembering how the skin of Dís’s tear-wet face stutters under such a touch. “It is not so cold.”</p>
<p>Dís’s eyes flicker down. Tauriel follows her gaze and notices that her breasts are frozen into hard points that pierce the heavy drape of her wet hair. She expects a teasing comment about her body contradicting her words. But Dís says nothing. Tauriel shivers, the cold suddenly clutching her throat tighter now that the sun has started to set. “I also probably like the cold more than your husband did,” she admits with a smile, trying to find the threads of what Dís truly intended to say. They have not often spoken directly of Dís’s husband. It was rude of Tauriel not to notice her attempt to open up on the subject. Several weeks ago, when every shared moment was permeated with grief, she would have noticed Dís’s meaning immediately. Her reflexes have dulled, softened by this evolving companionship.</p>
<p>With a shiver of surprise, Tauriel realizes that their time together no longer revolves around an absent center, a shared loss. Their time together, for Tauriel, revolves around Dís.</p>
<p>But Dís says nothing more on the subject. She smiles broad and warm, and fills up their cooking pan with water before taking it back to their camp. </p>
<p>~~~</p>
<p>“I am not ready to face them,” Tauriel says, untacking her horse in the stable of the inn they will be staying at. She tries to mask her shame in conviction. After all her mistakes, and all Dís’s forgiveness, she should be able to face Kili’s uncle and accept his judgment. Instead, she feels that her choice is between backing out of their supper arrangements or feeling sick and guilty for days on end. </p>
<p>But this seems to be the one thing Dís cannot understand, for she blames Thorin more for Kili’s death than Tauriel ever could without lessening the familiar weight of her guilt. Dís tosses her long locks over her shoulder with an iron-heavy smirk. “Is this you recognizing your limitations and forging your own path?”</p>
<p>“I do not pretend that it is courageous.” Tauriel drops her bridle on its peg with a dramatic thud which makes her sound more upset than she is. She sighs. “I am choosing comfort over courage.”</p>
<p>She turns to Dís, expecting to see disappointment visible on her face. But it is easy to underestimate Dís’s inscrutability. “You deserve to be comfortable,” Dís says, her eyes impossible to read even as they rake up and down Tauriel’s body. She turns abruptly back to her pony, patting its rump with a gentle hand. “I like you comfortable.”</p>
<p>Up in their shared room, Tauriel unpacks some of their belongings while Dís changes out of her travel wear to put on something more suitable to a hobbit dinner. Without particularly meaning to, Tauriel catches a glimpse of her chest as she slips out of her undershirt one shoulder at a time. The skin there is shadowed with fine black hairs and the ink of tattoos that start at the sternum only to quickly trail off into the secret folds between her breasts and her round stomach.</p>
<p>Tauriel abruptly turns back to her task when she realizes she is staring, compelled to look and invade the privacy of Dís’s body beyond even her own comprehension. She grasps at the first conversation topic she can think of. “You would think the innkeeper had never seen a dwarf and an elf ask for a shared room,” she says with a laugh, remembering the narrow-eyed look expression of the small hobbit who took their coin. She wonders if it would have forever been that way for her and Kili, constantly scrutinized wherever they went.</p>
<p>When Tauriel’s eyes drift inevitably to Dís’s form again, she is covered at least in a light tunic. Dís gathers her hair to pull it out from under the material, and then her beard. The golden sunset catches the orange hues in her bright eyes. “More likely, he had never seen anyone so beautiful as you, and could not believe his eyes.”</p>
<p>Taken aback by the unexpected compliment, Tauriel feels her hands slow to stillness and her breath rise in her chest. Her cheeks feel hot. Her beauty, if it can be called that, is certainly not what gave the innkeeper pause. Dís must be trying to flatter her out of her worries. And so, out of respect for that effort, Tauriel tries her best not to worry.</p>
<p>“I was told that there is a Shire custom of bringing a bottle of wine as a gift to your host,” Dís says as she dons a longer dress, covering her legs and weighing down the swell of her chest so her body moves less freely. Tauriel watches closely, feeling strangely frustrated by the inhibited motion, as if it were her own body being constricted. “I brought a couple of bottles. Would you mind unpacking them?”</p>
<p>Tauriel takes well to doing such tasks when instructed, having spent most of her life around royalty. She promptly finds the bottles in one of their bags and holds them up, one in each hand.</p>
<p>“Thank you.” Dís’s gaze fixes on her in a way that makes her seem suddenly closer, though she does not take a single step. “I do not know much about these things. Which of those seems the finer wine?”</p>
<p>“In my opinion?” Tauriel asks, looking uncertainly at the vintner’s markings on the dark glass bottles. It feels strange and intimate to be picking out a gift for Dís’s family. She does not feel qualified to choose a wine that will be consumed by Thorin Oakenshield. Thankfully, the choice is fairly straightforward. “This one is finer by far,” she says, holding out the one she recognizes from Thranduil’s cellars.</p>
<p>“Excellent.” Dís steps close then, looking up at Tauriel with that haughty, knowing smile of hers that’s so different from her son’s. She takes the chosen bottle and pops the cork from it right there. Tauriel gapes in surprise as she watches Dís pour red wine into the two little wooden cups on the dresser. “Since I appreciate fine things more than my brother does.” Dís smirks without lifting her eyes from her careful, heavy pour.</p>
<p>Laughter tickles Tauriel’s throat when she realizes Dís means to show up late to dinner with an inferior gift and a bit of liquid courage already running through her. She sets the other bottle down on the dresser and accepts the cup Dís hands to her. “To fine things,” Tauriel says, lifting her cup toward Dís in the way she has observed at dwarvish feasts.</p>
<p>“To fine things,” Dís echoes. Her eyes don’t leave Tauriel’s as they take their first sips.</p>
<p>~~~</p>
<p>They drink seated on the sill of the open window.</p>
<p>Even in the cut-grass breeze flowing into the room, Dís smells like fire, like the fragrant smoke curling tenderly off the edges of burning wood. Tauriel drifts toward it, heat-seeking and instinctive, the way a thirsty body can follow the sound of running water without alerting the mind. Confusion of senses is its own secret logic.</p>
<p>It takes several refills of their small cups to finish half a bottle. It takes Tauriel half a bottle to realize what she is feeling.</p>
<p>“Do dwarves love only once?” she asks, watching the rounded curves of Dís’s pink lips and craving their comfort in a way she cannot describe.</p>
<p>“Do elves define love only by marriage?” The scolding in the question makes Tauriel’s cheeks flood with heat, her stomach tighten in fluttering knots. Dís sets her palm flat on Tauriel’s thigh, and all the heat from Tauriel’s cheeks drains and pools much lower. “I may never love as I loved my husband again, just as I may never love as I loved my son again, or as I loved my first boar.” She does not meet Tauriel’s eyes as they both laugh, choked breath and choking light. Her fingers clutch in Tauriel’s skirts as if it’s a reflex of laughter. Her eyes seem fixed on that spot. Tauriel lifts a steady hand to the soft tuck of Dís’s chin and bravely tilts her face up. She can look into the dark glitter of her gaze when Dís says, “But there are many forms of love.”</p>
<p>The light changes. The sun goes down. Tauriel curls her fingers and traces through the thin curtain of Dís’s beard, and she falls in magnetically close.</p>
<p>“I should go.” Dís turns to look out the window. Tauriel’s lips miss the warmth of her face so close, and the loss feels like guilt. </p>
<p>“Of course,” she says, astonished at how little breath there is in her own voice. Nothing happened. There is nothing to miss, nothing to regret. Yet her stomach feels hollowed out, as though she had taken a heavy blow.</p>
<p>Dís collects her things and straightens herself up, and that is when Tauriel starts to truly miss what she now realizes she wants: to touch the strong, sturdy curves of her body and feel safe; to kiss her lips and feel that warmth melting around her; to wrap herself in the broad, sure touch of those hands that can command linen just as well as metal.</p>
<p>But if Dís feels differently, then the desires are selfish, and so Tauriel says nothing. She stands politely and holds out the unopened bottle of wine. Dís accepts it with a grateful nod. Their hands linger together on the bottle. “If I do not go now, I never will.”</p>
<p>Tauriel smiles, understanding that an unpleasant task is sooner finished if it is sooner started. She is still smiling when Dís walks out the door without another word. </p>
<p>Alone, Tauriel faces the cold prospect of an evening with only her thoughts for company. She does not know where to begin untangling them, and she worries that untangling them will inevitably lead to more acute loneliness than she already aches with. She wonders if her knives may need sharpening, and how long they might keep her distracted from the fact that she wants more from Dís than she could possibly have a right to.</p>
<p>She is still standing in the middle of the room a minute later when the door clicks open and Dís comes barreling in, grumbling in a language Tauriel can’t understand. Her heart races like it has no right to. Dís strides forward and drops the bottle of wine to roll away on the floor, and Tauriel is kissing her before she even decides she is going to.</p>
<p>It’s so much. It’s so much <em>more </em>than she could have anticipated. It’s everything she has come to love about Dís all at once, molten and hot in her mouth, pushing in deep and sucking and tasting and fire-breathing. Her knees weaken, and Dís shoves her back against the wall to pin her upright and at the right level, and Tauriel has never felt anything like the deep, beautiful pressure of Dís’s stout body carving space against hers.</p>
<p>And soon, her knees weaken further when a low, rasping question pushes up against her lips, but Dís holds her upright with her shoulders bracing her thighs, her mouth pushed up under her skirts, molten and hot between her legs, pushing in deep and sucking and tasting and fire-breathing. </p>
<p>~~~</p>
<p>Tauriel traces Dís’s tattoos under starlight, gathering sweat from beneath her breasts until her fingers are tacky. Beneath her resting cheek, she feels the vibrations of Dís humming. It’s something like a lullaby, but neither of them will sleep soon.</p>
<p>Tauriel reaches for the wine bottle and empties the last of it into the cup they have been sharing from.</p>
<p>Dís stops humming. Her hand strokes down the side of Tauriel’s bare ribcage. “Now I feel ready to face my brother. Tomorrow, fashionably late, an elf at my side.”</p>
<p>Tauriel breathes into the cup of Dís’s palm. She feels too happy to properly feign affront, but she makes an attempt. “Now I see all I am to you. Merely a tool to use to irritate your brother. It is for that purpose that you—” She considers the word while watching Dís tilt her head off the bed for a sip of wine. Her amber eyes flicker with as many shades as the sea has currents. “That you seduced me.”</p>
<p>“Come with me tomorrow,” Dís asks quietly. Her heart races under Tauriel’s hand, which seeks hungrily, spoiled and taunted by how much skin there is to touch. “I would have them see me happy.” Excitement burns through Tauriel, for there is so little she knows about how she might fit into Dís’s life, so little she knows about Dís’s life at all. There is so much to learn. “With you, I would be happy,” Dís says, quieter yet. </p>
<p> Tauriel bends to taste the words on her lips, to try them out on her own. <em>With you, I would be happy.</em></p>
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